This year we have worked on readings which develop the written and reading skills at the same time by developing a Unit of Work that focused on these aspects including the oral one developed in our previous tasks.
READING AT SCHOOLS:
Reading is important to our pupils’ academic achievements, it involves a complicated process. We have to be careful when trying to develop written and reading interaction with the children because failure to learn reading during Primary Education or even Childhood Education can make some pupils with a lack in the ability to read well; children with limited reading skills may develop poor self-esteem, lack of motivation and behavior and academic problems. As future teachers we have to have the knowledge of reading strategies, teach reading strategies to our students to some extent about 1 hour per week minimum and tried to avoid those teaching practices that use to be reluctant to employ some class time for readings.
EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITIES OF NARRATIVE AND FICTION READINGS:
Teachers use to focus on the same reading strategies in class such as setting the purpose of reading, working on understanding the meaning of words and doing comprehension exercises… and this is not very appealing to children’s’ eyes.
But there are many effective reading strategies which at the same time are not so frequently used and should be encouraged. Strategies such as: setting context, relating the text to students’ schemata and predicting or interpreting texts.
Emphasis should be given to understanding the contextual meaning of the narrative texts and not to understanding the meaning of the lexicon presented. Teachers also use to fail when encouraging children’s interaction with the narrative texts.
One more of the teachers’ responsibilities is to train kids to determine their goals and strategies and how to use all these strategies according to their levels, interests and needs talking about narrative texts. Teaching these kinds of reading strategies help kids to understand what they are doing and why it is important to practice it.
As future teachers we will have to give the pupils explicit advices and instructions, more explanations and why to use certain strategies should be given to them.
To develop reading and written skills we will use the Curriculum planners as a reference, the Curriculum planners used will be the Spain one, the Castille y León one and the British Curriculum, they will help us to provide our kids the necessary strategies and skills so they can be effective and independent learners.
FICTION NARRATIVE READINGS FEATURES:
There are many types of narrative, they can be fiction, factual or a combination of both, but the one we have deal with is the fictional. These narrations have a huge variety of themes and topics to choose from. The main purpose of these texts is to catch and gain pupils’ interest and attention, they use to teach and inform or simply to tell a story.
Traditional narrative readings have a certain structure, divided in some parts, each part focuses in a certain series of action.
- Orientation/ introduction: this where characters, the setting and the time of the story are established.
- Middle: keeps or attention and hold us until the end; this part is divided at the same time in other certain parts:
1- Action: it is in this moment when a trouble appears.
2- Climax moment: here is where action and trouble are nearby being solved, so this is the part where the tail concentrates all of our pupils’ attentions.
3- Falling action: troubles are finally solved, we can give meaning to the series of events that were set on the action and climax moments.
- Resolution/ end: the complication or complications are solved for better or worse, so we meet here the end of the tail.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES:
Here I give you a good suggestion presented as a book, “Developing Reading Skills”, in this book its author,Christine Nuttall, gives us some advices to let develop our pupils’ reading strategies.
Here there is other reading suggestion “Developing Reading and Writing in Second-Language Learners” by Timothy Shanahan who tells us that the limited vocabulary knowledge is associated with low levels of reading comprehension in English.
IMPORTANT RESOURCES, THE READING REGISTER:
During this course we have learned the importance of resources so as to achieve and develop some of our purposes, the one we have discovered this time is the reading register, this is a device where children can write down how many books they have read and when; they can also write down any comments they want to make or abstracts about the readings. With these devices teachers can continuously monitor the progress of students
DEVELOPED TASK: One more of the tasks we were asked to be able to create a Unit of work focusing on Developing written skill and the reading and oral skills too.
These are the cadboard theather and puppets we used in oder to represent on of the suggested activities:
This year we have worked on readings which develop the written and reading skills at the same time by developing a Unit of Work that focused on these aspects including the oral one developed in our previous tasks.
READING AT SCHOOLS:
Reading is important to our pupils’ academic achievements, it involves a complicated process.
We have to be careful when trying to develop written and reading interaction with the children because failure to learn reading during Primary Education or even Childhood Education can make some pupils with a lack in the ability to read well; children with limited reading skills may develop poor self-esteem, lack of motivation and behavior and academic problems.
As future teachers we have to have the knowledge of reading strategies, teach reading strategies to our students to some extent about 1 hour per week minimum and tried to avoid those teaching practices that use to be reluctant to employ some class time for readings.
EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITIES OF NARRATIVE AND FICTION READINGS:
Teachers use to focus on the same reading strategies in class such as setting the purpose of reading, working on understanding the meaning of words and doing comprehension exercises… and this is not very appealing to children’s’ eyes.
But there are many effective reading strategies which at the same time are not so frequently used and should be encouraged. Strategies such as: setting context, relating the text to students’ schemata and predicting or interpreting texts.
Emphasis should be given to understanding the contextual meaning of the narrative texts and not to understanding the meaning of the lexicon presented. Teachers also use to fail when encouraging children’s interaction with the narrative texts.
One more of the teachers’ responsibilities is to train kids to determine their goals and strategies and how to use all these strategies according to their levels, interests and needs talking about narrative texts. Teaching these kinds of reading strategies help kids to understand what they are doing and why it is important to practice it.
As future teachers we will have to give the pupils explicit advices and instructions, more explanations and why to use certain strategies should be given to them.
To develop reading and written skills we will use the Curriculum planners as a reference, the Curriculum planners used will be the Spain one, the Castille y León one and the British Curriculum, they will help us to provide our kids the necessary strategies and skills so they can be effective and independent learners.
FICTION NARRATIVE READINGS FEATURES:
There are many types of narrative, they can be fiction, factual or a combination of both, but the one we have deal with is the fictional.
These narrations have a huge variety of themes and topics to choose from.
The main purpose of these texts is to catch and gain pupils’ interest and attention, they use to teach and inform or simply to tell a story.
Traditional narrative readings have a certain structure, divided in some parts, each part focuses in a certain series of action.
- Orientation/ introduction: this where characters, the setting and the time of the story are established.
- Middle: keeps or attention and hold us until the end; this part is divided at the same time in other certain parts:
1- Action: it is in this moment when a trouble appears.
2- Climax moment: here is where action and trouble are nearby being solved, so this is the part where the tail concentrates all of our pupils’ attentions.
3- Falling action: troubles are finally solved, we can give meaning to the series of events that were set on the action and climax moments.
- Resolution/ end: the complication or complications are solved for better or worse, so we meet here the end of the tail.
Here I give you a good suggestion presented as a book, “Developing Reading Skills”, in this book its author,Christine Nuttall, gives us some advices to let develop our pupils’ reading strategies.
Here there is other reading suggestion “Developing Reading and Writing in Second-Language Learners” by Timothy Shanahan who tells us that the limited vocabulary knowledge is associated with low levels of reading comprehension in English.
IMPORTANT RESOURCES, THE READING REGISTER:
During this course we have learned the importance of resources so as to achieve and develop some of our purposes, the one we have discovered this time is the reading register, this is a device where children can write down how many books they have read and when; they can also write down any comments they want to make or abstracts about the readings.
With these devices teachers can continuously monitor the progress of students
Given devices:
In the link below there is other suggestion of reading devices:
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/reading-strategy-charts-and-bulletin-boards
INTERESTING LINKS:
http://www.rhlschool.com/reading.htm
(In here you could look for Reading comprenhension worksheets)
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Schoolslearninganddevelopment/HelpingYourChildToLearn/DG_4016579
(Here you will find some information and a video that will help you to see the importance of Reading in childhood)
http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/developread.htm
(Web site which propose some advices when developing activities due to work with readings)
http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba/fluency.html
(Here is a bit of information about strategies to develop fluency when reading)
http://www.hltmag.co.uk/aug09/mart02.htm#C3
(Complete website about Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language)
http://www.kidsource.com/schwab/developing.reading.skills.html
(Some advices about developing Reading skills in Young children)
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/96/
(Six Tips for teachers about teaching in Literacy Instruction)
PDF
http://www.eurojournals.com/ejss_12_2_14.pdf
DEVELOPED TASK:
One more of the tasks we were asked to be able to create a Unit of work focusing on Developing written skill and the reading and oral skills too.
These are the cadboard theather and puppets we used in oder to represent on of the suggested activities:
This is the templete we used and complete:
MY READING RECORDING: